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Friday, April 4, 2014

Siege at Rabbit Trap

When the thirteen-year-old boy ran from the burning house,
trying to escape the attack on his

stepfather’s home, a federal marshal shot
him in the back.

But it wasn’t 1992 at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. It was 1892 at Rabbit
Trap, Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory.

The posse of lawmen sent from the federal court in Fort
Smith, Arkansas claimed the man they were after was a killer, the cold-blooded
murderer of one of their own – Deputy U.S. Marshal Dan Maples.

The fugitive was a conservative Cherokee senator, a member
of the Executive Council, a respected citizen in his community.

Ned Christie had
grown up a keetowah, that sect of the Cherokee Tribe who believed in strict adherence
to traditional tribal ways, their language, their religion, their education; not
their assimilation into the white man’s culture as the U.S. government had
insisted.

He was a man given to impassioned speeches on the legislative floor
of the National Council; speeches against the incursion of the United States
into the lands of their sovereign nation, particularly that set forth by the
Dawes Act of 1887 which mandated the breakup of Indian lands into allotments.

But Christie had his enemies, even amongst his own. And he
had a weakness: he liked to drink.

In May, 1887, Christie was in the Cherokee capital of
Tahlequah to attend a Council session. One evening he and an acquaintance, John
Parris, a known whiskey runner, set out to get a bottle. They ran into Bub
Trainor, a local hell-raiser and another illicit liquor dealer.

Deputy Maples was also in town that night along with his
posseman George Jefferson. Maples had warrants for the arrest of Parris and
Trainor on charges of introducing liquor into the Indian Territory, a common felony
of the time.

Maples and Jefferson had set up camp near Spring Branch
Creek, which happened to be near where Christie and four of his drinking
buddies, including Parris and Trainor, had decided to party.

While crossing a foot bridge on the Spring Branch late that night
coming back to his camp, Maples was ambushed and killed.

Posseman Jefferson named Christie as the shooter,
all based on circumstantial evidence.

Christie claimed he was innocent, mainly because he’d been
in a drunken stupor, but also saying he had no gun on him, had not brought one to town.

Heck Thomas

He was willing to turn himself in if the Fort Smith court would
grant him bail so he could prove his innocence, but Judge Parker refused. Not
thinking he’d get a fair trial in a white man’s court, Christie fled to his
home in the dense forested hills near Tahlequah know as Rabbit Trap.

Over the next two years several deputy marshals were sent to
ferret-out Christie, but he always ran them off with gunfire, wounding several. In 1889 a new
marshal in Fort Smith decided the stand-off with Ned Christie had gone on long
enough, and sent his best deputy, Heck Thomas, to bring him in.

Deputy Thomas had his posse surround Christie’s cabin one
pre-dawn morning, and called out for the outlaw to surrender.

Ned responded
with a loud turkey gobble and several shots from his Winchester. A gun
battle ensued.

Christie’s wife ran from the cabin escaping into the deep woods.
Her son, James, stayed with his stepdad.

Deputy Thomas decided to set fire to an out-building
thinking to smoke Ned out, but the flames leapt to the cabin setting it ablaze.
Sometime during the fight, Christie took a bullet to the face which broke his
nose and took out his left eye. The ball lodged in
his back leaving him temporarily blinded and paralyzed, but the lawmen didn’t
know this as young James kept firing from the cabin.

Soon the flames and smoke
became too much, and unable to move his stepdad, the boy fled. He made it to a
rail fence before the bullet caught him in the back. Still, he managed to hobble
off into the woods.

Cherokee Senator Ned Christie

One of the deputies in Thomas’s posse had taken a bullet leaving
him severely wounded. Realizing he needed to get his colleague medical aid, and
thinking Christie’s wife would soon return with re-enforcements, Thomas decided
to withdraw. They supposed their quarry was probably dead inside the burning
cabin.

Ned’s wife did return with help, and finding Ned still alive,
pulled him out of the cabin and away to safety. He eventually recovered and
regained sight in one eye. Knowing word of his survival would get out and
back to the law in Fort Smith, he returned to Rabbit Trap and
started rebuilding. But not just a cabin, a fortress.

With help from his confederates, Ned cleared land out to
fifty yards around the site of his new bastion.

They constructed a two-story
double-walled rock and log structure, the space between them filled with dirt
and sand. It had no windows, just gun ports on all four sides. It was virtually
impregnable.

An entourage of family and
friends came to live with Ned, including his stepson, who'd also survived his wounds.

Filled with bitterness and hatred for all that had befallen
him over a crime he said he never committed, Christie sent word back to the law
in Fort Smith, to Heck Thomas in particular, that they should come and
get him if they could. For three more years, time and again, lawmen did try to
extricate Christie from his stronghold, but were always repelled. By that time
a reward of $1,000 had been placed on Ned Christie’s head.

Some of the Posse Who Brought Christie to "Justice"

Finally, in the fall of 1892 a posse of dozens of men was
formed to make an all-out assault on Christie’s citadel. They even brought
along a cannon borrowed from the military.

A battle raged for more than a day.
Thirty-eight cannonballs were fired at the walls, but had little
effect. A dozen of the possemen were wounded.

Then in the dark of night, twelve
sticks of dynamite were placed at the base of one wall and set off. The explosion blew out
a corner of the fort and set it afire. Christie came charging out of the smoke
and flames firing his rifle and screaming his war cries. He was cut down in a fusillade
of gunfire.

The reign of what the press called the most dangerous and
blood-thirsty Indian outlaw ever was over.

Because Ned Christie was the only suspect, the murder of Dan
Maples was never officially solved, but in 1918 the truth came out. A Tahlequah
blacksmith, Dick Humphrey, said he saw the whole thing while walking home from
work on the night of May 5, 1887. It was Bub Trainor who shot Maples, and then
threw the gun down near the passed-out Ned Christie, and it was Bub Trainor who’d
first said Ned was the shooter. Because the Trainor family was a powerful one
in the town, and because Bub was a mean SOB, Humphrey never said anything out
of fear of reprisal. But now that they were all dead, and he himself was 87, he
thought it only right that he set the record straight.

Though fictionalized, one of the best accounts of the Ned Christie affair is Larry McMurtry's and Diana Ossana's novel Zeke and Ned. For those who love historical fiction, I highly recommend it.

Very well-written piece. I wrote a short story about Christie, "Ned Christie's Fort", several years back for the Bob Randisi-edited anthology Black Hats- it also appears in my collection Red Trails -and I plan in the near future to both expand that into a novel and do a lot more research on the subject for my next big history book project, about law enforcement in Indian Territory. Ned got a raw deal- no surprise, considering.

who really knows what happened over a hundred years ago. There were bad whitemen and bad Indians, race has never dictated guilt or innocence. With so much prejudice from both sides, then and now, it's a fool's game to believe one side over another.